August 11, 2023 - 2:10pm
A new starter is born
Spontaneous fermentation of water soaked raisins (sultanas). 3rd life cycle (refresh) [pic]
Kept @ 27°C for 3 weeks (once a week remake with water and fruit + previous ferment top-up)
Then used to seed a flour and water dough at a concurrent 27°C, kept in a volume of water.
7 days and 7 refreshes @ 1:1 or thereabouts daily (24hrs).
Next 8hrs, then 4hrs x3.
Typical float time = ~45 mins in all cases.
Looking good for a viable vigorous starter.
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Hello Mike, just wanted to say thanks for all the knowledge sharing / the absolute nuggets of tips in your videos and blogs over the years. I have sucessfully made my first panettones yesterday. I spent some time getting my lievito madre working. I firtst converted my regular starter mid August, but that never worked out, somebody later gifted me some organic grapes, so I started afresh with those, back in maybe early October. To be frank there are a lot of useless guides out there. Interesting to see your approach, e.g. looks like you are really going for investing time in yeast power above, even before converting to a pasta. Compare with the like of : if your fruit water mixture hasn't gone frothy in a day, throw it away!
Appreciated your youtube video of you kneading your madre, compared wth guides that say it has to be as dry as possible, which I found to be unworkable/ unkneadable. Appreciated your comments in blogs over the years urging people to stop messing about with lower temperatures and spend time with it in warmer temperatures, comparable to a bakery in the mediterranean. Compared with guides saying it's okay to feed once a day at cooler temperatures, it might just take a few more days to gain some sort of strength. Like week by week I watched my madre's performance deteriorate.
I'm generally pleased with how it went, my first dough went more than 4 x volume in 8 hours at 28 deg C overnight. To be honest, it caught me out a bit, I wanted to mix the second after 3 x expansion, to leave enough gas in the tank. The second dough I could tell was a bit too sticky, and I learned that I need to be more comfortable with wetter doughs. The recipe I was using used an excess of liquid to soak the raisins, which, even when drained, resulted in a wet second dough, which I adjusted by adding more flour by feel. I got there in the end and was pleased with it as a first attempt.
Thanks for keeping it real and staying as true to the proper knowledge as possible! Peter
Thanks Peter, I'm glad you found my contributions useful.
Indeed there is a lot of information out there, some good, some not so good, so well done for taking the plunge.
I am sure as you continue, you will learn more and more and your results will get better and better.
I like what you said there about keeping it real. I couldn't agree more.
Thanks!
Michael
Hi Michael! I've been psyching myself up to attempt to make a new LM and hopefully have a bit more success with panettone this year and would love to know a little bit more about how this process went for you. If you have time, could you offer a little more detail about how you went about this (or what you might do differently next time)? Would love to know specifically a bit more about the three refreshes you did with the fruit water, and when you transitioned from 1:1 to a 45-50% hydration and cooler temperatures (or perhaps I'm misreading and it was always 1:1:0.5). I know it's virtually impossible to catalog every step of this process, but definitely appreciate your expertise!
I also made one in this way a while back when on holiday with no sourdough to play with and it was great. So good I brought it back with me and used it until a fridge multifunction resulted in it and all the content of the fridge having to be thrown out.
I left mine as a 100% hydration liquid starter.
I found the bread made with it had a nice deep caramel undertone in flavour.